THE YEAR’S HIGH NOON 
85 
the faded fineries that are her only daylight wear, that 
the gloaming hour should find her thus transfigured ? 
It is the story of Cendrillon over again—she who was 
the shabby cinder-wench in the heat of the sun, puts on 
her gown that is like sun, moon, and stars in one at the 
fairy-godmother’s bidding. I, for my part, incline to 
disbelief in the old tale as the story-books tell it, and to 
think the conventional close must have been merely a 
benevolent concession to our universal desire for happy 
endings. Believe me, that particular fairy-godmother 
was more than common wise, and out of her knowledge 
that princes may be sometimes disappointing, you may 
depend upon it that she rapt Princess Cendrillon away 
from the very steps of the throne itself and changed her 
into the Princess CEnothera instead. 
There is a conspiracy of silence between the birds 
and the roses from about the middle of July. The 
music of the feathered garden-folk and the blossoming 
fragrance of the rose-plots have ceased, as it were, 
together, as by some secret mutual understanding. 
They have vanished away, and gone where the lost 
Aprils are and the lost Mays; and, although the breath 
of earliest autumn will presently awake many of the 
roses from their enchanted sleep, there will be none to 
sing to them. 
Opening anew in the cool dawn of the year’s decline, 
opening, as they will, to their very best of colour and 
of beauty under the pearl and silver of veiled skies, 
there seems something of mystery, of strangeness, in the 
hushed moment of their return. The mood of the 
season is touched to reverie. 
